The Ice Trilogy

In Vladimir Sorokin’s novel The Queue, one of the protagonists is
struggling with a crossword: ‘1 Across – Russian Soviet writer.’
Suggestions come from people next to him in the long line that is the
book’s setting and subject – Sholokhov, Mayakovsky? – but are
rejected, because neither fits both adjectives at the same time. When
Sorokin wrote The Queue in the 1980s, these adjectives – always in
tension – could still sit together in a handful of cases (the answer
settled on is Gorky); but since then, they have been severed from each
other by the watershed of 1991, and now represent distinct historical
epochs, as well as two separate literary cultures.